toastywombel

BBC kinda throws it over the top, I think. It might be a valid theory. Remember the scientists are trying to unify all the laws of nature into one theory. gravity is the only force that is hard to unify with the others. In an attempt to unify gravity with the other theories, mathematicians and physicists use equations and mathematical constructs assuming from state A to state B a particle assumes all possible paths. This, to some scientists, implies that there are parallel universes in which the particles assumed different positions. Because of the "all possible paths", which is really referring to particles, some may conclude that there are parallel universes for any time-line ever possible as long as they are not contradicting. There are varying opinions on this among the science community though. However, again it should be noted that if there are parallel universes, in all practical purposes they would be unreachable and that the "if they exist?" question is a small topic in the search for the theory of everything. Of course ratings probably played a roll in the presentation of that documentary (intense music/ commentary), but it provides some good commentary and description to a viewer who may not highly educated in physics of a picture of our universe.

Okay this is a big problem I have with Christianity right there. God is the alpha and the omega, he is all powerful and has existed forever. He also is the creator of the Universe. Christians praise God for all the beauty in the world, yet God is not responsible for the bad in the world. Shouldn't he take the responsibility though? He is the one all knowing and all powerful, meaning he created us and our Universe, already knowing the faults each individual might have. Then he condemns us to hell for things we do, in which he already knows the outcome. Seems kind of un-fair doesn't it? But seriously Religion has no place here. It is not based on any scientific data.

You are 100% wrong on space/time, and on the Big Bang having nothing to do with it. I wish I could explain this better, but Space can only be measured when mass occupies it. Space started expanding after the Big Bang and it is still expanding now. This is what is causing the galaxies to appear to be moving apart. Time is a physical property of the Universe. It is dependent on the observer. I think I mentioned previously about the experiment in which two atomic clocks were flown around the world opposite ways on a jet. They were synchronised before take-off. Mind you these are the most accurate clocks in the world. After they landed both clocks were checked and they were a little off! This is because of the clocks velocity relative to each other, and the fact that the speed of light is constant for all observers. According to the equations behind relativity the time values of the clocks had to be different. And believe it or not it actually happened. These super-accurate atomic clocks that were synchronised before take-off were not synchronised after they landed. Furthermore the equations of relativity accurately predicted the time change on the clocks. This evidence greatly supports the idea that time is not eternal but a physical property of the universe determined by light and the speed of the observer. You can reference previous posts for information supporting the above. You might also want to check out time dilation. Observers or light did not exist in our universe before the big bang, therefore time did not exist, as we know it, before the Big Bang. Interesting note: turn your radio station to a channel that is not occupied. A tiny part of the static you hear is leftover radiation from the big bang. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedBlood Padron! You asked earlier how do we know that the universe is expanding? We can calculate the velocity of the stars in the universe by how red-shifted they are. Let me explain: Light travels in waves. Mathematically we know a lot about the properties of these waves. One being the Light spectrum. By observing the color of light we can determine its wavelength. This image is from here. By knowing the wavelength we can determine the frequency by using the following equation: F=c/Wavelength where c=the speed of light ("F" equals the "speed of light" divided by the "wavelength") Since we know the value for "c" and the value for the wavelength we can use simple arithmetic to solve the problem and find the frequency. You can find more about the validity of these equations on the wikipedia page for Wavelength. Now knowing the frequency we can determine the velocity of the star relative to the observer. I present the equations and descriptive picture: where v{s,r}, is the velocity of the source relative to the receiver: it is negative when the source is moving towards the receiver, positive when moving away c, is the speed of wave As you can see we already know the values for "F" the frequency from the previous equation. We also know the speed of the wave (c= speed of light). We can then use simple algebra to determine the v{s,r} or velocity of the source relative to the receiver. Generally when the source is moving away from the receiver the wave-length is stretched making the frequency greater. When the source is moving towards the receiver the wavelength is compressed making the frequency smaller. This is known as the Doppler Effect. You can find out more about the Doppler Effect there. This science is fundamental to many applications we have today. One being radar. This image is from here. When we observer our universe through telescopes we can use the above math to determine the speed of the star relative to us. When we calculate this, we notice that generally all the galaxies are moving away from us, and the further they are the faster they are moving away. This is how we know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This is a bit of history on the discover of the expansion of the universe from here. "The expansion of the universe was discovered in 1929, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble brought together many scientists' work. In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote the General Theory of Relativity, which explained how gravity works. When Einstein applied his new theory to the whole universe, he found that it predicted that space should not be stable; it should either be expanding or contracting. Einstein refused to believe his own equations - like all astronomers for thousands of years, he had assumed that the size of the universe was not changing. The Sombrero Galaxy Meanwhile, on another continent, Vesto Slipher, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, was finishing a detailed study of the night sky. Through his telescope, he examined several of faint, fuzzy objects called "nebulae," from the Greek word for "cloud." He discovered that light given off by the nebulae was redder than it should have been. Slipher knew that when an object's light looked too red, that meant it was moving away from Earth. He calculated the nebulae's speeds from the redness of their light, and found they were all moving away from us incredibly quickly: one, the Sombrero Nebula, moved away at 2.5 million miles per hour!" I have attempted to explain the evidence that has already been presented to you in a simple way. Please take the time to read it before you attack it or reject it (saying just "I disagree" is a weak argument against the above mind you). Hopefully this will help you understand the workings of the Universe and how our civilisation has achieved knowledge of some of these workings through simple observations, mathematics and physics. Whew! I feel like listening to some creed after that.

Maybe it is a bad idea to bring this opinionated topic back up, but this is something that just came off of http://www.sciencedaily.com. This is new data too. "The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years --1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 -- for the second warmest on record." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121170717.htm

Position, velocity, time is only measurable if there is mass moving in relation to other mass. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that space existed before the Big Bang. To even measure the curvature of a space, one needs mass and light. Furthermore, time did come about after the Big Bang. Time progresses at a rate dependant on the velocity relative to an observer, that is one of the most fundamental understandings in physics. Photons and electrons came into existence after the big bang. There have been experiments proving relativity. If relativity is correct, time is determined by the speed of light and the velocity of the observer. Light or observers did not come into existence until after the Big Bang Carbon dating is based off some assumptions, some of them you mentioned previously, but it is fairly accurate in dating things several thousand years old, not trillions of years old though. This is not the point of the post though so I'm going to refrain from commenting further on this.

I think that space trash is considered more of a danger to the space station and other artificial structures that are in orbit around Earth. The chances of a piece of space trash being able to re-enter the atmosphere and land in a populated area seem unlikely. Link of space-trash falling to Earth: http://www.astronomytoday.com/blog/space-trash-falling-heads/ Wow I just became extraordinarily tired, maybe a head rush. Anyway, I don't think it is wise for one to worry about space debris. There is a plethora of threats to one's health that are much more likely to come about, than space debris.

"The new hydrogel is more than 50 times stronger than comparable squishy self-healing materials, researchers led by Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo report in the Jan. 21 Nature. Such substances are well suited for the body; they are 95 percent water. Hydrogels may one day serve as scaffolding for growing new tissue, as matrices for keeping drugs in their targeted area or as replacements for damaged cartilage. The new gel, unlike similar materials, is quick and relatively simple to make." http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/55483/title/Break_up_doesn%E2%80%99t_keep_hydrogel_down

1. Something that is existing in space completely isolated for trillions of years could not be dated back accurately. The big bang happened 13 billion or so years ago. This was when time and space first came into existence as we know it. How would you date something older than time itself? 2. On your questions about the properties of fundamental particles, they sometimes vary, but fundamental particles exhibit a particle/wave duality. If you look over these two links you may get a better idea of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_physics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality 3. To say that Carbon-14 dating is based off just assumptions, is wildly misleading.

I saw this post earlier today, and I thought the same thing. I've read some of the reviews, and many of them say that the author favors dualism (mind is separate from the brain). This is a great quote from the book: "the concept that mind is primary over matter is deeply rooted in Eastern philosophy and ancient beliefs about magic”

Do you have any idea what the characters are? Is the screen black or blue? Does it ever get to the desktop?

Since were talking health care, we really need a single payer system, but I guess that's politics section. But in response to the OP, I think that Coakley will win. By 10-15% points.

That is really impossible to say for sure if he had the heart attack because his diet was high in butter.

Mokele is right, as time and technology have progressed human kind, on the whole, has progressed. Life spans are greater, we are better connected, we can communicate faster, we can respond to emergencies faster, we have more advanced medicines that are based in science not mysticism, we have better roads, and lower crime-rates today than at the turn of the 1900's; And it is definitely better now than in Mayan times.

Cool article, yeah I would agree that we will have solved this problem before the end of this century.

So I came across an interesting article about the HIV virus. I don't know if this has been mentioned already but, "Drug-resistant strains of HIV have already been documented in San Francisco and elsewhere in the US, and Europe. Now a model of their transmission, based on studies of gay San Francisco men, forecasts a rapid upsurge in the next five years." http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18394-drugresistant-hiv-set-for-rapid-upsurge.html From what I know, antiviral medication is really effective on extending the life of the patient and extending the onset of full blow AIDS. Here is one study supporting the above claim. Strains of HIV that are drug-resistant; It is a somewhat scary thought.

Quantum World, by Kenneth W. Ford Great book, a link to Amazon Review here! You can also find it at most book stores. Barnes and Noble's and Borders both have it hear in New Mexico.

There is a beta scienceforums youtube channel, that I am attempting to put together. There is some calculus, linear algebra, and physics lectures from MIT. As well as some other lectures in the feilds of biology, physics, and quantum physics. http://www.youtube.com/scienceforums, or at the link at the bottom of all my posts.

Well of course we might be able to make some advancements and improvements through mutation here and there. I guess your right about the amount of energy you would get from that though, but it would lessen the amount we need to eat.

Yeah I thought it was a great article too very interesting. I thought of a future, without food, where we use the dna from the slug and somehow combine it with human. Then maybe we could produce by ourselves with sunlight and CO2, but we would all probably be green.

The speed of small amplitude gravitational waves according to wikipedia are exactly the speed of light. Here "Speed: This is the speed at which a point on the wave (for example, a point of maximum stretch or squeeze) travels. For gravitational waves with small amplitudes, this is equal to the speed of light, c." Furthermore, the Big Bang is not the cause of our universe necessarily. The Big Bang is more of a moment in time in which right before all matter was at one (theoretical point). Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, has often said the universal forces the moment before the big bang were combined into a super-force. Finally, when you said asked how could there be other forces at the beginning of the big bang? Well atoms formed around three seconds after the big bang, that is the nuclear forces. Also once atoms formed they began exchanging electrons, that is the electric forces right there. So as far as three seconds after the big bang, the fundamental forces existed. Finally, the force that caused the big bang is what caused the stretching of space time. I think that would be a force one might consider existed as long as gravity, and therefore existed at the beginning of the Big Bang. Links you might find help-full: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/kids_space/forces.html&br=gr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force#Fundamental_models <--This is interesting.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_%28linguistics%29

The Cold Dark Matter theory, found here, has been used to explain how the universe formed into a cosmic array of galaxies from the moment of the big bang. This is from the above link: "In the cold dark matter theory, structure grows hierarchically, with small objects collapsing first and merging in a continuous hierarchy to form more and more massive objects. In the hot dark matter paradigm, popular in the early eighties, structure does not form hierarchically (bottom-up), but rather forms by fragmentation (top-down), with the largest superclusters forming first in flat pancake-like sheets and subsequently fragmenting into smaller pieces like our galaxy the Milky Way. The predictions of hot dark matter strongly disagree with observations of large-scale structure, whereas the cold dark matter paradigm is in general agreement with the observations." However, the Cold Dark Matter theory is not perfect, again from the above link, "1. The cuspy halo problem is that cold dark matter predicts that the rotation curves of halos be peaked much more strongly than what is observed in galaxies. 2. The missing satellites problem is that cold dark matter predicts large numbers of small dwarf galaxies about one thousandth the mass of the Milky Way. These are not observed." The second is actually wrong, well not exactly wrong, but it is definitely not a correct statement. Wow something on wikipedia wrong? I know right. The Cold Dark Matter theory actually does predict dwarf galaxies, and these galaxies are observed by astronomers. However, the theory predicts that these dwarf galaxies should have more matter and be much more massive at their cores. The following is from http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dark-matter-galaxies-100113.html "It has long been a mystery why small galaxies don't have as many stars and matter in their centers as predicted. Now scientists have found the answer with a new simulation of galaxy and star formation." "The so-called cold dark matter theory does very well at explaining how most large structures in our universe form. But it cannot describe dwarf galaxies that well: It predicts that they should have more mass, including both normal and dark matter, in their cores than they do. " Although I think that wikipedia article should be corrected, and new information be cited that is not the point of this post. The interesting point is that scientists may have finally found out why these small (dwarf) galaxies do not have as many stars or matter in them as predicted by the Cold Dark Matter Theory. A research team led by an astronomer from the University of Washington has released a report that involved using millions of hours of supercomputing power. The following is from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100113131454.htm "The simulations showed that as the most massive new stars exploded as supernovas, the blasts generated enormous winds that swept huge amounts of gas away from the center of what would become dwarf galaxies, preventing millions of new stars from forming." So the super massive stars that formed in the early years of our universe exploded as supernovas. The blast caused the gases that are needed to form stars to be pushed out of these galaxies. It seems rather trivial and simple, but it provides an reasonable explanation to how small dwarf galaxies formed. I am sure now astronomers are going to begin observing the night sky for evidence of this. Finally, I think the mistake by wikipedia should be noted again: "2. The missing satellites problem is that cold dark matter predicts large numbers of small dwarf galaxies about one thousandth the mass of the Milky Way. These are not observed." This statement seems to imply that dwarf galaxies have not been observed, this is completely wrong. A simple google search provided me a link to an newspaper article from the Albany Times, check that link and others verifying that there have been observations of dwarf galaxies. "For the first time, a dwarf galaxy has been detected as it merges with the Milky Way, researchers say." http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-156782661.html "We give a summary of the current status of our Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Snapshot Survey of probable nearby dwarf galaxies. The purpose of this ongoing survey is to fill in the nearby galaxy census and to derive basic properties of galaxies which are suspected to be nearby on the basis of previous groundbased exploratory studies. The survey has been approved for 75 orbits in cycle 8, and 125 orbits in cycle 9. Within each orbit we obtain 600 second exposures in F606W and F814W of one nearby galaxy candidate using WFPC2. The resulting color-magnitude diagram can be used to determine the general characteristics of the stellar population, as well as the distance to a galaxy with an old stellar population using the TRGB method. Data for selected galaxies will be presented, as well as the summary of all galaxies observed to date. Of the 37 galaxies observed to date, almost all of them turn out to be nearby (within 4 Mpc) dwarf galaxies." http://aas.org/archives/BAAS/v32n2/aas196/409.htm Even in a book, Near Field Cosmology with Dwarf Elliptical Galaxies, released by the International Astronomical Union, which can be found here on google books states that there are 38 probable candidates for the classification of Local Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies and has a chapter discussing the Local Population of Stellar Dwarfs in the Universe. As you can see from the news paper article above, the Hubble Telescope observations, and the book, Near Field Cosmology, dwarf galaxies have been observed. Although it is good to note that there is not as many small (dwarf) galaxies observed as there are predicted by the Cold Dark Matter Theory. Summary of Links: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dark-matter-galaxies-100113.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100113131454.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_dark_matter http://www.physorg.com/news182674516.html http://books.google.com/books?id=NSFNfFZT284C&dq=observed+dwarf+galaxies&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=pktPS4_1I4zosQOQwJ3_Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=12&ved=0CDUQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q=observed dwarf galaxies&f=false http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-156782661.html

Time would slow down for someone going that fast comparative to time on earth. You are correct, to the person travelling the speed of light, time would seem normal. The reason time is different though is because the speed of light is constant. If two observers have to agree on speed they must disagree on time or distance. But no, if you were in a craft going the speed of light and tried taking off at the speed of light you would still remain at the constant. It would not be double the speed of light

The speed of light is always constant 'c'. So no matter how fast you are going the speed of light is 'c'. Imagine. If you were in a craft travelling at the speed of light time would begin to slow down. Here is a good video that helps explain relativity.

Interesting article I found: "The kleptomaniac sea slug Elysia chlorotica feeds on algae by sucking out the innards of filaments. The slug takes in the little algal organelles for photosynthesizing and, researchers now say, can also manufacture the compound, chlorophyll." http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/53496/title/Sea_slug_steals_genes_for_greens%2C_makes_chlorophyll_like_a_plant

I am getting the feeling that many of you are assuming that black holes get smaller in size. So far observations tell us that black holes always become larger in diameter as they grow more massive.